Children’s Museum of the Arts is pleased to announce Game On!, an exhibition about our passion for sport and how it has defined our individual and collective identities. Throughout history, the world of games —with its inversions of mastery, dependence on chance and reliance on both verbal and physical play—has intrigued and inspired visual artists. Game On! presents works by contemporary artists who take a reflective, critical or inspired look at sport and how we play the game. Addressing issues of identity, power, heroism, nostalgia, popular culture and gender, Game On! highlights a variety of media that reminds us that within every ruled system, there exists potential for creativity and exploration.

The artists featured in Game On!—Louisa Armbrust, Zoe Buckman, Dario Escobar, Michelle Grabner, Norm Paris, David Rathman, Christin Rose, Jean Shin, and Hank Willis Thomas—investigate the line between freedom and authority embodied in games and sports. From the portrayal of masculinity and femininity in boxing iconography, to wistful history preserved through photographs of abandoned basketball hoops, the works in Game On! explore an array of games and their dynamic histories.

Penelope Umbrico has been featured in a new article on Widewalls titled, “These Abstract Photographers Redefine Perception of the Real,” naming Umbrico as one of “the greatest masters in the history of Abstract Photography.”

Andrew Schoultz has just completed his largest mural to date: a seven story high tree overlooking one of Manila’s busiest intersections. Schoultz spent 7 days on the mural, titled “The Heard of Gods Country,” as part of ArtBGC Mural Festival.

NOORDERLICHT 2016 casts a forensic look at the traces left behind in the landscape with ARENA running from 22 May through to 3 July at Museum Belvédère in Heerenveen. 21 artists from around the world unearth the stories that take place on and under the skin of the landscape.

We live in a time when our global culture has subordinated nature. It has become almost impossible to experience unspoilt land, no matter how far we direct our gaze. What remains once humanity and its thirst for action has left the stage, in search of ever-greener pastures?

ARENA is the prologue to the project series Landscape as Arena, which focuses on the decisive impact man has on the landscape. With his dominant creational force, man leaves an overpowering mark on the landscape: by living, working, and recreating on it, and by extracting raw materials from it on a mass scale. Through the continual exploitation of land worldwide, we see the landscape steadily changing. Every economical application brings new stories into the soil, but also into the oceans and the sky. They lie there, like layers of geological sediment, awaiting eventual exposure.

The traces man leaves behind in this way result from careless deeds as well as from unscrupulous actions. At one end of the spectrum we find the innocent residues of history, at the other extreme we see changes that are so radical that the future of our planet is at stake. Changes in climate make it painfully clear that the human impact has become far greater than we could ever have imagined. The current geological era is therefore often called the Anthropocene, the era in which the consequences of human activity become perceptible in the climate and atmosphere.

For ARENA twenty-one artists have been invited from around the world, showing with their respective images a part of the bigger story. The photographic series offer the public substance for reflection and make us aware of the fragility of the created landscape. At the same time, Noorderlicht demonstrates how engaged art can be inspirational, in the transition towards a more responsible way of dealing with our natural environment.

The exhibition shows, for example, photographs of the mining industry in Chile and its effects on the environment. We see the plastic floating in our oceans. Quarries intended to contain the radioactive waste from Fukushima. The sweltering rainforest and cold glaciers. But also photographs of Dutch dunes brought back to their original state, and images of – is it fictional or real? – a previously inhabited island given back to nature by man.

The first public art museum founded in the Western United States, the Crocker Art Museum was established in 1885 and is now one of the leading art museums in California. The Crocker serves as the primary regional resource for the study and appreciation of fine art. The Museum offers a diverse spectrum of special exhibitions and programs to complement its collections of Californian art, works on paper, European art, international ceramics, photography, Asian art, and African and Oceanic art. The Crocker Art Museum is the only museum in the Sacramento region accredited by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), a recognition given to less than 800 of the nation’s 17,500 museums. AAM accreditation certifies that a museum operates according to standards set forth by the museum profession, manages its collections responsibly, and provides quality service to the public.

David Klamen (American, b.1961) is a contemporary painter whose work grows in conjunction with his interest in philosophy and scholarship, centralized around the questions,”How do I know what I know?” and “How do I know myself?” Klamen paints figuratively and abstractly, sometimes combining the two by incorporating geometric lines or patterns atop his high finished landscapes. Says Richard Gray Gallery, “His current paintings test epistemological strategies as diverse as OP Art (and its implication that knowledge may be a purely retinal experience), empiricism (the idea that the sole source of knowledge is direct quantifiable experience), introspection, and others. In this investigation, Klamen plays with the history of art, utilizing modern and pre-modern conventions as metaphors for our communal search for meaning.”

Join PCNW for an artist lecture on image reappropriation with Penelope Umbrico.

Friday, May 20th
6:30 – 8:30PM

Umbrico works “within the virtual world of consumer marketing and social media, traveling through the relentless flow of seductive images, objects, and information that surrounds us, searching for decisive moments—but in these worlds, decisive moments are cultural absurdities.” She finds these moments in the pages of consumer product mail-order catalogs, travel and leisure brochures; and websites like Craigslist, EBay, and Flickr. Identifying image typologies—candy-colored horizons and sunsets, books used as props—brings the farcical, surreal nature of consumerism to new light.